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Reader question: Please explain this headline: Obama Administration ‘Cooking the Book’ to Achieve Record Deportation Numbers. My comments: Here the Obama Administration is accused of fudging figures, or manipulating statistics to flatter itself. By cooking the book here, they make deportation numbers look larger than they really are. In other words, the US Government under Barack Obama probably did not deport as many people as they say they did. There are many ways one can cook the book, of course, like there are many ways one can cook a meal. Indeed, the phrase “cooking the book” is inspired from cooking itself. Many vegetables and meats do not taste very good if you eat them raw. So people cook them first. In so doing, chefs boil, fry or steam them, adding salt, oil and spices. After this creative work, the vegetables and meats taste very different, usually much better than before. Cooking the book? Likewise, only the book here refers to the accountant’s record book, a record of daily transactions, sales and income, money taking in and going out. In cooking the book, people manipulate the numbers, dressing them up, to make the company look good. For example, a company may have suffered a net loss in the fourth quarter, but among the monthly figures, December’s numbers were slightly better than that of the same period a year earlier. So therefore, instead of stating upfront that net losses were recorded for the months of October-December (sending another chill to its share holders who are playing the stock market in the meantime), it emphasizes its December numbers, saying this growth year on year clearly shows the company is pulling out of its year-long doldrums, thus cheering its share holders up. | 
